Denison Class of 2029 Official RD Thread

[RookMSU]

Great suggestion, I’ll tell him to check it out.

[cleveland132]

How do you think Denison compares to a Grinnell for pre-med? Any difference? So hard to get into med school these days.

[RookMSU]

I don’t know anything about Grinnell. Most of what I have read is that most SLACs offer fairly similar ability for pre-med. That said, there will clearly be some differences in the quality of science programs and pre-med advising.

[cleveland132]

Yeah. Doubt there’s any difference. Both are excellent.

[tjun555]

Great discussion regarding medical school alumni from different schools on this thread if you haven’t seen it. Probably should be taken with a grain of salt - I’m sure some schools attract more non pre-meds than others, which might bias the numbers.

Colleges with Acceptance Rates Above 20% & Strong Pre-Med Programs

Getting into med school is hard, and most students who think they want to become doctors never do, no matter how strong of a student they were in high school or what college they end up attending (@WayOutWestMom has shared data on this before). But many students and/or families come to the board to ask about which colleges are especially good at preparing their students for med schools. This website (which I found from a link on law schools shared by @NiceUnparticularMan) lists 2024 data on the percentage of alums who attend(ed) any medical school: To give some framing, here’s some ranges of percentages of alums followed by what “rank” of colleges there were for that range: 4.0%: #1 (Johns Hopkins) 3.1-3.7% #2-5 (Harvard, Yale, Rice, & Brown) 2.0-2.9%: #6-23 1.0-1.9%: #24-65 0.5-0.9%: #66-148 0.1-0.4%: #148-297 Students and families tend to have an easy time finding low probability colleges, which are those that have acceptance rate of 20% or less (i.e. rejecting at least 80% of …

[bridzz]

Love this idea and will mention it to my D25. We are about to start on a month of acceptance visits to Denison, Oberlin, St. Lawrence, Dickinson, and Skidmore (couldn’t visit during the application process). My husband and I are Oberlin alums, and our kid’s Denison application initially gave him pause because he played them in college sports 40 years ago and always thought they were snobby, lol. We’ve heard things are a bit different there now, but it will be interesting to check it out in person!

[pestopesto]

I think we’re down to U of R, Pitt, and Denison. They would prefer to study CogSci but are ok doing Neuro+ Psych as they plan to go grad school.

They can really see the value of the smaller community and SLAC value from Denison but wondered about the Neuro Concentration option there (number of kids in it, credibility when apply to grad school, etc.). They know Columbus is only 25 minutes but are a little nervous by the size of Granville.

Pitt has the bigger city feel they really want and U of R has CogSci, the flex curriculum, and then perception of a nerdier overall student body. The weather would suck but they are not that concerned.

Really interested in any families out who kids is longer for a science degree with intentions to go to grad school and is comparing pro/cons SLAC vs Large State U vs Mid Size Stem Private.

No obvious right answer in their head.

Planning to make the red-eye for admitted student date at U of R next week. Already have visited Pitt and Denison.

Any families out there with a similar quandary?